Event communication correlation is the process of associating an event communication, such as an incoming telephone call from a customer, with additional information associated with the person, entity, or device from which the communication originates. Take for example a customer of a utility company calling to inquire about his utility bill. The utility company must correlate the incoming phone call with additional relevant information for the customer, such as the customer's account information. In this context, a historical “event communication correlation” process is described.
A call center such as the utility company has no advance notice that a customer will be calling, and thus cannot prearrange to correlate a phone call with relevant account information to service the phone call. When the customer's phone call does arrive, the utility company will receive little or no information describing the content of the phone call. In limited circumstances, the utility company may receive caller identification (“caller-ID”) information describing the phone number of the originating location or ANI (automatic number identification) information, likewise describing the phone number of the originating location.
When an incoming phone call is received at the utility company, via the public switched telephone network (“PSTN”), it is generally placed into a hold queue. The customer's phone call remains in the hold queue with several other phone calls from other customers, each call waiting to be answered by the next available customer service operator (“operator”). Time in the hold queue varies from just a few seconds to many minutes and is unaffected by the urgency of the customer's phone call, the content of the phone call, the event triggering the necessity of the phone call, or any classification that the utility company has assigned the customer. The time a phone call remains in the hold queue is primarily affected by the ratio of operators servicing the hold queue to the number of connected phone calls.
Eventually, the customer's phone call moves to the front of the hold queue and is answered by the next available operator, just one of many operators at this particular call center representing the utility company. When the customer inquires about his bill, the operator must somehow correlate the customer with the appropriate account information associated with the customer. Stated differently, the operator must perform an event communication correlation method to associate the incoming communication event, the customer's phone call, with the customer's account information.
Historically, event communication correlation has been accomplished through the use of outdated and rudimentary techniques. One common method is by oral exchange and confirmation of unique data. For example, the operator may ask for one of several unique keys by which the customer's account information can be retrieved, examples of which include: social security numbers, company specific account numbers, customer addresses, and telephone numbers. The customer orally communicates the unique key to the operator, who manually enters the unique key into a database interface, and when successful, gains access to the customer's account information and can service the call.
Other historical methods of event communication correlation include the use of DTMF tones, ANI data, or caller-id data. DTMF stands for “dual tone multi-frequency” and is more commonly identified by its trademark “TOUCH-TONE.” Event communication correlation applications make use of DTMF tones after a telephone call circuit has been established by use of a series of menus or DTMF data entry prompts.
Take for example the same utility company having received a phone call from a customer. Upon connection of the telephone circuit, instead of the customer being placed into a hold queue, the customer is prompted with a pre-recorded spoken message instructing him to select one of several menu options or to enter a unique key by which he may be recognized as a specific customer. The customer presses one or more keys on his telephone, which in turn generates and transmits corresponding DTMF tones that are received and interpreted by a DTMF decoder at the utility company's call center. When the customer correctly responds to the prompts and correctly enters a recognized unique key, such as an account number, the communication event has been “correlated” with the customer's account information.
A company or call center may further employ the use of ANI or caller-id information in an attempt to correlate communication events to additional relevant data. Using this method, a call center captures the customer's telephone number transmitted during the initial moments of the telephone call as caller-id info from a telephone carrier or as ANI information from an ANI service. The captured telephone number is then used as a unique key to correlate the customer's account information with the incoming communication event.
Unfortunately, each of the methods described above are inadequate for the modern needs of event communication correlation. The use of oral confirmation for correlating information is unacceptably slow and inaccurate. The use of DTMF tones is likewise unacceptably slow due the period of time it takes to either manually or automatically input and then transmit the DTMF tones to the DTMF decoder, during which time the customer must wait on the line for the event communication correlation process to complete.
The use of caller-id and ANI information is likewise inadequate as it suffers from a high rate of failure due to the incompatibilities of telecommunication equipment and telecommunication standards used to route a phone call from its origination point to a destination.
Historical wireless telephony devices serve only to exacerbate this problem, because as they “roam” on to foreign or non-preferred networks, they commonly require the use of a temporary telephone number by which they can communicate with destinations or other devices connected via the PSTN. This temporary telephone number causes any attempted event communication correlation process to fail as the temporary telephone number will not be correctly associated with the customer.
Some historical event communication correlation techniques for wireless telephony devices have employed the transmission of “in-band” data over the voice channel as audible signals encoded and transmitted at a wireless telephony device, such as an automobile, and received and decoded at a destination, such as a call center. For example, a historical telephonically enabled automobile can detect an air-bag deployment event and initiate a phone call to a predetermined call center. When the call center receives the phone call, it must correlate the incoming phone call with the appropriate account information related to the automobile in order to service the call. The automobile will then transmit a series of DTMF or other audible tones over the voice channel to the call center, which the call center decodes into identifying information used to properly correlate the phone call with associated account information. Unfortunately, this method of event communication correlation can be time consuming, and prevents voice communication between the call center and the occupants of the vehicle while the audible tones are being transmitted. Meanwhile, the occupants of the vehicle may be injured as the result of a car accident, disoriented, and desperately require help, but the call center cannot provide aid to the occupants until the lengthy in-band event communication process completes.
While telecommunication companies generally transmit the audible portion of a telephone call seamlessly, data describing the communication event, such as ANI and caller-id information, is often lost or corrupted during transmission. Furthermore, methods such as in-band event communication correlation are unacceptably slow for many applications. Because the prior art methods for event communication correlation are slow and unreliable, they are inadequate for modern event communication correlation needs requiring high rates of reliability and minimal delay.